The nature of all code is that larger systems are built from smaller underlying systems and components. They in turn are also constructed from smaller components. The bug you are tracking down will have a cause in one of these systems, and will have symptoms that are visible in other systems. The remaining systems work fine (as far as the bug you’re looking for is concerned), and you can use this to quickly and reliably find where the bug is.

Divide your larger systems down into smaller systems at logical points, such as different server stacks, APIs, major interfaces, classes, methods and if necessary individual lines of code. Test both sides of the divide, with your tests focusing on the data that crosses the divide. If one side works as expected, the bug is not in there, and you can eliminate that side from further testing. Continue testing the remaining systems and components, which you have now isolated, by dividing those up into smaller systems and components. Keep going until you’ve reached the smallest testable system, component, unit, or lines of code that show the fault. Congratulations: you have isolated the fault.

Apart from being a strategy that allows you to work on code you’ve never seen before, this approach also has the advantage that it is evidence-based. This approach eliminates guess work, and it forces developers’ assumptions about how their code actually works in practice to be challenged. The data never lies, but be aware that it can be mis-interpreted!

The approach is iterative, and you’ll find that you’ll often go back and forth between your code and your tests, making your code easier to test and your tests have clearer and more targeted test domains and results. Fix the tests that are relevant to the bug you are tracking down, and make a list of any other issues you find along the way for you to come back and address at a later date. Stay on target, and park potential tangents and distractions for another time.

Although this sounds like a slow process when described on paper, with practice it can be executed at high speed during an emergency situation. However, the need to restore service in a timely manner isn’t always compatible with this approach, and you’re normally better off returning to your test environment where you can study the fault without inconveniencing your customers any further.

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My single weight’s not bad normally (it certainly stands up to scrutiny during class, which is a good start), but this was different.  This was a connection with the ground that I’ve not come to before.  I don’t know what it was, or how really to describe it, but I’m going to be looking out for it in future and seeing if I can achieve it again and study it further.

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• Why We Learn In Groups
• Use My Notes But Think Of The Environment
• Teachers must be patient with themselves
• Too Much To Relax
• Using Your Aches And Pains

I don’t get a lot of feedback on the podcasts, so I’m not sure whether they’re really of any interest to anyone.  If you enjoy them, let me know in the comments.

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Back in June, I took part in the annual Photomarathon for the first time.  It was definitely weird using a chemical camera for the first time in six years!  Like many of the competitors, I also had my digital equipment with me, and I’m really glad I did, because as the sun was setting I was wandering past Cardiff Bay’s run-down railway station, and was able to snag this shot.

This station sits at the southern-most end of the oldest surviving railway line in South Wales - the Taff Vale Railway (TVR).  Sadly I haven’t been able to find any photos online of what this station looked like when the docks were in full swing, but books such as the Glamorganshire and Aberdare Canal do have some photos on the printed page if you’d like to compare.

This is the very first HDR shot I’ve processed since being forced to upgrade from PhotoMatix Pro v2 to v3.  I’ve used v2 for all of my HDR work to date, but sadly it doesn’t work under OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard.  Still, first impressions of v3 are very encouraging!

Full details are in the listing on eBay.

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Then keep an eye on your inbox … there’ll be an email from the PHPNW09 organisers in the next day or so including a discount code you can use to buy tickets for my course at a nice reduction.

And if you’re not yet convinced that you’d benefit from the training I’m offering, I’ve put together some reasons why this is important, and what benefits you’ll get from the course.

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To make my notes easy to find, I’ve added a new Class Notes page to the website which lists all of the notes I’ve uploaded.  I still need to finish off and publish my T’ai Chi for Improvers notes, plus the notes I’m scribbling away about my own practice!

And, to make my notes as free as possible, I’m licensing them under the Creative Commons Attribution Share-Alike 2.0 (UK) license.  This license allows you to re-use my notes, and to make your own version of these notes, provided you give the original author (me) credit and that you also distribute your own version of the notes under the same license.

This makes our T’ai Chi notes a Free Cultural Work.

Why am I doing this?

• Our art has a tradition going back at least to Yang Cheng’fu in the 1930’s of sharing everything we know.  This means you don’t have to take any modern teacher’s word on T’ai Chi; you can go and track down a translation of Yang Cheng’fu’s book and see for yourself.
• When my teacher died, his surviving family chose to withdraw the two instructional aids he had made during his lifetime (videos of both himself and his teacher playing the form).  This sadly means that my students (and, in time, their students) cannot compare their own understanding and practice to that of the teachers who went before me.  My own work, such as it is, is now a Free Cultural Work and can never be withdrawn from my students when I die.

I hope you find these notes helpful, and I’m always keen to receive feedback to help me improve them still further.

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• Know The Shapes And Make The Shapes
• A New Isolation
• What Is Your Attitude To Tai Chi?
• Homework: Where Are The Thirteen Postures?

There were no podcasts in August, as unfortunately I’ve been recovering from a car crash.  However, the academic year starts again in September, so expect plenty of podcasts once more :)

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When it’s just you, working on one project at a time, it’s easy enough to keep track of the work you’re doing and the work you still need to do to complete the job.  Chances are you can keep it all in your head, or at least keep the discussions with your customer on something like Basecamp in your head.  You know that you should be using source control and bug tracking because it is “best practice”, but it just seems like too much of an overhead to bother with when it’s just you.  After all, you’re working on the customer’s server, and there’s no-one else editing the code anyway.

Some of the folks reading this blog post might be cringing at that, but I’ve lost count of the number of times I’ve come across professional PHP developers who work in exactly this way.  Is it because they don’t know better?  Maybe.  Is it because it has worked okay for them up to now?  For sure.

But eventually, there comes a point where one developer becomes a team of two … or more.  Having a team means that you can go after larger projects … but it also means that you have to go after larger projects to pay the team.  Larger projects mean more complicated requirements, multiple phased deliveries … and a larger, more demanding (and probably a more complicated) customer holding the pay cheque.

Running a team of PHP developers (like all management activity in all walks of life) comes down to three key things: direction, organisation, and supervision.  Only now it isn’t just you and a customer, just a list that you can keep in your head.  Now you need to keep track of a larger list, of multiple lists for multiple people to work on that need to be brought together in the end, and if anything slips through the cracks it’s your reputation on the line.  Getting the customer to come back for repeat business just got a lot less easy to take for granted.

Trac and Subversion have been part of our community’s toolkit for many years now.  Used correctly, you can get yourself and your customers well-organised, and grow your reputation when you grow your team.  If you haven’t started using them yet, both are open-source, and well-backed with plenty of information freely available around the blogosphere on how to use them.

Or join me in Manchester in early October, where I’ll show you how they fit into an overall approach to running your team of PHP developers.

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1. Cheap and cheerful desktop machines w/ multiple monitors and plenty of RAM, normally with AMD CPUs.  These machines mostly run some form of Linux … Ubuntu and Debian are both popular.
2. Various laptops, a fair mix of MacBook Pros and other kit running Linux.
3. Virtual machines running on the desktops and laptops, used for cross-browser testing.
4. Virtual machines running on HP servers and blades, used for system testing, release testing and production.

It gives us a lot of flexibility, allows us to develop and test on standards-compliant environments (but still use Windows for testing IE), and most of the time the developer is the bottleneck not the equipment  Recently, I’ve added both a netbook and an Atom-based mini-itx machine into the mix, and this blog post is my attempt to recommend that you consider doing the same.

Netbooks are incredibly popular in the wider computer-owning population.  Over here in the UK, they come free with many mobile broadband packages, making them cheaper than many low-end laptops.  They’re sold in the supermarket and the high street.  Their small form factor and relative lightweight makes them appealing to people who would never willingly cart a traditional laptop around.  And they run Windows, which most people are familiar with.

After an initial explosion of innovation, the specs have settled around a 1.6GHz Atom processor, 1 GB of RAM and a 10″ 1024×600 resolution screen.  That’s not a lot of power, and it isn’t a lot of screen estate.  How do your websites look on a netbook?  Does your home page or your landing pages make an impact at that size, or is your site’s message partially or completely below the fold?  How do the rest of the pages look?  If you’re creating an app, does the user have enough of a working area to comfortably do their tasks?  Try using Google Reader or Zimbra on a netbook to see examples of what to avoid.

And how do your websites run on a netbook?  Too much Javascript, and the pages won’t be snappy.  The CPU won’t keep up, and the different latencies and throughput of mobile broadband make round-trips back to the server much more noticeable.  Javascript that fires at regular intervals (e.g. rotating marketing spotlight images) can force the CPU to switch execution speeds, and so drain the netbook’s battery much quicker.

Testing on a netbook is one way you can spot and deal with these problems before your customers do.

Stuart is running a course in Manchester in October immediately before the PHPNW09 conference on how to setup and organise your PHP developers to ensure things run smoothly for you and your customers.  Learn more about the course, or sign-up now.

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It’s an odd statement … the world and his dog knows that PHP is immensely popular over here in Europe.  Perhaps Remi completely overlooked the Windows factor here?

1. I’ve been running a series of polls looking to learn more about the wider PHP community.  One of the things that comes out of those polls is that 15% of developers use Windows as a platform, but only 3% are using Windows for their production platform.
2. At this year’s PHP UK Conference in London, Microsoft’s Hank Jansen (who heads up their open-source efforts) spoke in the main room.  I wasn’t able to attend personally, but by all accounts his talk was not well-attended.  Not only aren’t people using Windows, but the curiosity doesn’t seem to be there either.
3. Most hosting services (and practically all shared hosting services) are Linux based.  If you want to host your site on Windows Server, there are plenty of firms offering this as an option, but many of these services are beyond the budget of many PHP projects.

My personal experience over the years is that many developers work in PHP on Windows because they’re working on laptops … and Linux on laptops continues to be a very hit-and-miss experience sadly.  (They should all buy Macs instead ) About half of the larger corporations I’ve worked with in the UK prefer Windows Server because Linux skills are rare in their organisation, but these corporations were also reluctant to use PHP-based solutions, still wrongly seeing PHP as a hobbyist language compared to .NET or Java.

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Immediately before the conference, I’m running a two day tutorial in the fundamentals of setting up and running a team of PHP developers, covering:

• Keep your promises to your customers using written specifications
• Organise your team using Subversion and Trac
• Control quality using code reviews
• Deliver to your customers using release management and follow-up support arrangements
• Where to go after the course for additional learning

Places are limited to just 25 people, and there is an early-bird discount for anyone who signs up before 21st September.  You can find out more on the course website, and sign-up online.

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Now that PHP 5.3 has been around for a few months and we’ve started seeing plenty of blog posts covering all the new features in PHP 5.3, I’m wondering whether or not you have actually moved to PHP 5.3 yet.  I’m especially curious to see how this compares to what people said they’d do before it came out

Please vote on twtpoll to let me know if you have moved to PHP 5.3, and if not, what’s still stopping you. Many thanks in advance!

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• Saturday 5th September 2009: 10am to 1pm, at Palmerston Adult Education Centre, Barry.
• Wednesday 9th September 2009: 6:30pm to 8:30pm, at Barry Comprehensive.

I’ll be there to answer any of your questions about Tai Chi or the course, and hopefully to convince you to join our classes.  The classes themselves start later in September, and will be on Thursday nights at the Barry Island Community Centre.

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Outside work, my wife and I were involved in a car crash at the end of July.  We’re both recovering well, although my wife won’t be back at work until at least mid-September.  This has meant we’ve had to take things very easy for the summer, but I’m hoping to be back online and blogging regularly again shortly.

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My banged-up knee came through my first full practice on Saturday, so I’m up for testing it for a full two-hour class on Tuesday.  Hope to see all my students there!

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I hope the next Tuesday class (planned for 25th August) will go ahead.  I don’t know yet whether or not I’ll be at the Knapp on Saturday morning.

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1. Tuesday 14th July, 7pm, Barry Island Community Centre
2. Tuesday 4th August, 7pm, Barry Island Community Centre
3. Tuesday 25th August, 7pm, Barry Island Community Centre

All of my students are welcome, regardless of whether you’re returning next academic year or not.

And if you’re curious about Tai Chi and would like to find out what it is and what our classes are like, you’re very welcome to come too!

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• A Night Of Reflection
• An Observation On Looking At The Ten Principles
• Begining To Find Your Balance
• Elbows Low Exercise
• Principles Are Yin And Yang Too
• The Difference Between Not Knowing And Not Doing
• Thoughts On Practicing
• Thunderstorm
• What A Difference Every Day Makes
• Where Do You Practice?

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Please vote on twtpoll to let me know where will you get your PHP 5.3 from? Many thanks in advance!

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Pontypridd stands on the banks of the River Taff and the River Rhondda as the gateway to the valleys beyond - and the mineral and coal riches that were exploited between the late 1700’s and the 1980’s.  From its first bridge in 1750, built to allow travel to market without crossing a deadly river ford, via what is possibly the world’s oldest surviving railway bridge, to the modern road bridges of today, it has always been necessary to bridge the rivers at Pontypridd in order to get from A to B.

Thoughts On The Day

I was taking a week off between jobs to get my annoyance with my former boss’s behaviour out of my system, and it was a real relief to get out and about with the camera.  The weather was lovely, and what could be better than a walk through Pontypridd taking shots of the different bridges that have sprung up in this market town?

I’m always surprised at how Pontypridd has failed to capitalise on Cardiff’s growth.  Why hasn’t it become a booming commuter town for everyone who can’t afford the house prices down in Cardiff itself?  Sitting at the very northern end of the Taff Vale, the old TVR railway splits north of Ponty to take travellers up the Rhondda Valley to Treherbert, up the Cynon Valley to Aberdare, and up the Taff Valley to Merthyr Tydfil. That gives Ponty three times the amount of trains passing through each day.

Today, Pontypridd feels more important to the folks who travel down from those valleys than anyone else, marking as it does the half-way point in the journey from the tops of the valleys down to Cardiff.  I guess the history of its bridges shows that Pontypridd has always been a place people travel through rather than a destination in its own right.

Favourite Photo From The Shoot

It wasn’t easy to pick just one photo from this group, but this is the one that I like the most.  I just think it does a great job of showing off a very beautiful bridge

The Photos

Here are all of the photos from this photo shoot.  I hope you enjoy them as much as I enjoyed taking them.

Post Production

This set of photos marks the start of the next evolution in my photographic style.  I’ve been using HDR for several months now, but this time I was determined to put together a workflow that brings the HDR images closer in initial appearance to regular, single-frame photos.  Before HDR, my favourite style had been the slightly desaturated look of the Taff Vale Eastern Ridge Walk set. What I wanted was that look, but with the added detail that HDR brings.  Too many HDR photos just lack a certain subtlety - as do too many single exposure shots, it has to be said!

Since taking these photos a year ago now, I’ve refined the HDR workflow over and over before finally coming back to these photos and re-processing them for publication at last.  I promise that I’ll do a full article on the workflow in the near future, but the main points are to avoid over-saturating the original HDR image, and then using Aperture 2’s new Saturation and Definition tools to bring out the best of the HDR detail whilst toning down its exuberance at the same time.

Sadly, I’ve been too short of time to thoroughly research each of the bridges in this set.  There’s also one bridge missing - Brunel’s bridge that carries the Taff Vale Railway north from Pontypridd station over the River Rhondda towards Abercynon.  I only noticed that whilst doing the write-up.  Doh!

Although I haven’t been posting new articles on here for some time now (new job and my Tai Chi school have had to come first, sorry), I’ve still been getting out and about with my camera taking new photos for future articles.  Redevelopment at both ends of the Merthyr Road area (Cardiff City Centre and the land to the south of Dowlais) make it more important than ever to capture this area’s industrial history before it’s gone forever.

I’ve updated the list of upcoming articles on the Merthyr Road project page.  At the current count, I have most if not all of the photos for 38 more articles, and I’m expecting to be out and about several times a month getting photos for even more articles

On top of that, I’ve started planning a third series of articles, to sit alongside the main Merthyr Road articles and the growing Single Shot Series.  I’ve been wondering what Cardiff and the valleys might have looked like if - instead of ripping up the canal and working hard to erase it from memory - if instead it had been protected, renovated, and still existed today.  I don’t have the means to travel to a parallel universe with my camera to capture this, but what I can do is visit other places in the UK which still have their canals, and play what-if that way.  So it seems appropriate that this new series of articles will be called the What If Series.

Interestingly, my thoughts about the Nokia N82 as a camera has consistently been one of my popular blog posts these past few months.  If that’s your thing, I do have several equipment reviews I’d like to write up and publish, including reviews on Foolography’s bluetooth GPS adapter for the Nikon D200 (summary: it’s worth every penny), my new Panasonic DMC-LX3 (summary: it’s very good, but it’s definitely not a general purpose camera), and the new Panasonic G1 kindly loaned to me by Panasonic this year (summary: it almost didn’t go back).

Finally, I’m hoping to write more articles on technique as and when I can.  I need to bring out an updated version of my popular Aperture Workflow article, I think it would be good to share the process behind my HDR photos (with the D200, I shoot mostly HDR these days), and after a near-miss at the weekend, an article on safety as a photographer probably wouldn’t go amiss :)  I’d also like to encourage others to do similar projects to mine, by explaining how I go about my research and the wide range of tools that are available to you today that you may not realise can help.

I hope you enjoy the work I publish. If you do, it’d be great to hear from you via comments left on the blog.  And I’m always looking for suggestions of new locations to visit and explore with my camera.

This one has been up on Flickr for several months now, but somehow I forgot to actually write a blog post about it to match!

Cardiff Bay has been (almost) completely transformed from abandoned dockyards into the playground of the wealthy in South Wales.  At the very centre of this new role proudly stands the Millennium Centre, a world-class arts venue for Europe’s youngest capital city.  And, when the sun strikes it at the right angle, it positively radiates.

There are good reasons why just about all the best photos of the Millennium Centre tend to be from this angle.

Known locally as the Coal Scuttle because of its distinctive shape and colour, the Millennium Centre is a surprisingly difficult subject to photograph.  If you think of its rivals around the world - most notably the Sidney Opera House - they are iconic buildings standing proud and prominent, an absolute delight to photograph and very difficult to photograph badly.  Sadly, like Cardiff City Centre after it, Cardiff Bay hasn’t been so much designed as a whole as had individual efforts constructed next to each other.  This has left the Coal Scuttle with mostly obscured lines, and as a photographer I’m left with the impression of a fat cartoon character trying to hide behind skinnier friends.

I think this is a real shame.  This is truly a great venue, with a real will to put on a world-class programme of arts to match.

Although the glorious Easter weekend weather is largely behind us now, for a brief moment this evening we had just a tiny reminder of how beautiful the sunsets can be around here …

It’s also the first shot taken with my new Nikon 70-300mm lens.  I’m certainly looking forward to getting it out into the field for a full Merthyr Road photo shoot

So here is a look at the 40-odd times I made it out in and about with my cameras in 2008, and a glimpse into the 4,462 photos I took.

I hope you find this enjoyable, and I’d love to read your review of 2008 in photographs too.

February started with a trip to Brighton for the day.  Although we’d been to Brighton many times in the past (we’re both great fans of Moshi Moshi and the Lanes Armory in equal measure), this was the first time I’d seen the ruined Brighton West Pier.  It left a lasting impression with me, and made for my most striking photo from the day.

March was a busy month, starting with the Explore show at the NEC, Birmingham.  One of the features of the show was the Ordnance Survey’s Outdoor Exploration Portal website, which I’d contributed to in 2007 and 2008.  I’d just finished a secondment to the Ordnance Survey, and it was nice to see the team promoting the website to visitors to the show before we all headed off to pastures new.

We actually spent the week staying in our favourite cottage up in the Malvern Hills, a place we love to retreat to when life gets a bit too much.  I always prefer photographing Malvern outside of the summer months, as the lower sun really brings out the contours of those wonderful hills.

And, although it’s a photo taken in 2007, March was the month that my shot of the rainforest biodome of the Eden Project was chosen to be the front cover of the Eden Project’s 2008/9 Guide Book.  Sadly, I haven’t made it down to Cornwall this year to see the books on the shelves in person, but the Eden Project were kind enough to send me a copy.

May saw us return to yet another stomping ground - Chesil Beach in Dorset.  We were last there in December 2005, my last trip out wielding the Nikon D100.  I’d always wanted to go back with the D200, but grey skies and gentle winds conspired to deny me the shot of waves crashing against this amazing beach that I was after.

June was another quiet month, photography-wise, with my cameras making it out the house just once, coming with me to work in Bath for the day.  Bath is such a beautiful city when the sky is blue, thanks to the sandy-coloured stonework throughout the city.

July followed the precident set in May; another trip to revisit somewhere with the D200, another denial.  This time, the place was Llanberis and the fabulous castle tower of Dolbadarn.  I’d last been here in 2003, using my Sigma 15-30mm lens for the first time.  The shot posted on Flickr from that visit had to be cropped because of vignetting I didn’t check for at the time; I’ve been wanting to try that again ever since, and as I had to drive up to Harlech to pick Kristi up at the end of a week-long art course, it seemed like a great excuse to swing by Llanberis and try again.  Unfortunately, Dolbadarn was closed to visitors, as it was being used for some sort of filming.  Epic fail!

At the very end of August, we headed up to the North Yorkshire Moors for two weeks of holiday.  Based in the picturesque village of Thorton-le-Dale just outside Pickering, we had a blast.  After arriving on the 31st, we wasted no time on the 1st September by heading out into York to visit the Minster.  Without a tripod, I found the low light conditions inside very challenging, and I managed to get into trouble for having my hat on my head (I’d run out of hands!)

There was no let-up the following day.  We went north to the Devil’s Arrows, before crossing over into the Yorkshire Dales to spend several wonderful hours exploring Brimham Rocks.  It’s one of the places from my childhood, and a great place to go to pick winberries (something we’d been and done in July).  We finished the day off with tea in Scarborough.

We went even further afield the following day, all the way up to Hadrian’s Wall in Northumberland.  This is the wall built from one side of England to the other to keep out all the troublesome Celts to the north.  Parking up at the visitor’s centre at Once Brewed (no, I didn’t make that name up.  There’s also a nearby village called Twice Brewed), we walked a bit of the wall in between sheltering under trees from heavy showers.  It’s a beautiful place, but our highest peaks are much more developed than this.  Well worth a visit, but make sure you bring your own food!  Soggy and hungry, we retired to the amazing Roman excavations at Vindolanda.  This one site is where much of our knowledge of Roman life in England comes from.  Photography isn’t allowed inside the museum, which I found disappointing, but if the Romans are your thing, there’s probably no better place to visit in the whole of England.

After such a long day, we made the next day a relatively light afair, visiting the bizarre standing stone at Rudstone in the East Riding.  This stone is remarkable for its size and location, standing almost as tall as the church which has sprung up beside it.  After a trip down to Hornsea in search of potteries that I remembered as a child but utterly failed to find as an adult, we retired back to Thornton-le-dale for me to wander around making the most of the late afternoon sun.

Friday was a rest day. Good job, as it turned out.

The plan for Saturday 6th September was to head out to the White Scar Caves on the west side of the Yorkshire Dales, where we’d meet my Dad travelling up from his home in West Yorkshire.  This was the day that the Dales were flooded, with roads closed and communities cut off.  Although the caves were still open when we phoned ahead, by the time we’d forded the floods and made it there they’d had to close the caves for the rest of the day.  The rising flood waters meant that we couldn’t head back the way we’d come, so in the end we headed out west to the M6 and turned south towards Manchester and the M62.  This is when I decided to kidnap Kristi for the rest of the day and take her to Blackpool to see the illuminations.  (Blackpool is a sadly run-down Lancashire seaside resort famous these days for its tower, the rides at the Pleasurebeach, a popular destination for hen and stag nights, and the Illuminations that it puts on from later in the year).  We had fun on the gentler rides at the Pleasurebeach, but by the time it was dark enough for the Illuminations to come on, we were too tired to really enjoy them.  I didn’t get any photos at all; I’ll have to go back another year to try again.  My Panasonic DMC-FX33 finally died too.  This day turned into an epic fail I think.

Sunday 7th was a much more successful day.  Kristi grabbed her pots and paints, and we ended up in Runswick Bay just north of Whitby.  Mmm …  a lovely relaxing day after the long mileage the day before, and Kristi did a lovely little painting that she finished and sold whilst we were there.

With the floods receeding by the Monday, it was time to head back into the Yorkshire Dales to Malham Cove.  I was really looking forward to exploring the limestone paving at the top, and of putting my 10-20mm lens to the test down in the cove itself.  Unfortunately, as we were walking along the footpaths towards the Cove, someone fell from the top of the Cove and died.  The party of walkers in front of me found him and called in the emergency services, but there was nothing anyone could do for him.  We spent the afternoon over at nearby Gordale Scar (my first visit there), before finishing the day taking photos of the small but perfectly formed Janet’s Foss.

Tuesday 9th was a rest day, and I took a day out of my holiday on Wednesday 10th to visit a customer for work.

Flamborough Head was our destination on Thursday 11th September.  We pottered around a bit, enjoyed a somewhat windswept picnic, and swiftly retired back to our holiday cottage for the day.

Friday 12th September was the last day of our holiday, and that meant it was time to travel on the North Yorks Moors Railway.  This privately-run steam railway winds its way through some picturesque countryside, with several stations along the way where you can hop out and explore.  Our first stop was the Malyan Spout waterfall near Goathland.  It’s an impressive sight, and I was both stunned and privately annoyed at the young woman who hiked out to it to then take photos of it using her camera phone.  I mean, a camera phone ffs!  Damn, it still annoys me now, months later :)  We had lunch at the pub in Beckshole, before heading back to Goathland to catch the train once more.  The train terminated in Grosmont, where Kristi decided to hide out of the rain with a cup of tea whilst sending me on a speed march up above the valley to find a stone circle shown on our map.  I had something like an hour and a half to hike 3 miles up the hill, find and photograph the stones, and then make it back for the last train home.  No wonder she stayed behind!  It was wonderfully eerie up in the mist, and whilst the stone circle was definitely of the kind you find when you stub your toe on it, just being so away from everyone else felt really great.

And that was it … our annual vacation was over, and it was time to come home.

We went on our first Flickr meet in October, to Margham Country Park with the folks from Welsh Flickr Cymru.  We didn’t really know anyone else from the group, and we’re both very independent people, so we actually spent the day wandering around on our own, occaisonally bumping into other WFC members.  We did really enjoy ourselves, got some nice pictures … but haven’t been on a Flickr meet since.  Hrm.

In November, I spoke at PHPNW 08 up in Manchester. On the way up, I picked up a Panasonic DMX-LX3 to replace the FX33 I killed during my September holiday, and all I can say is yum :)  It’s still early days with this camera, but I’m really enjoying the photos it can take.

Back from Manchester, I went for a walk down by the river in Bath with the LX3, checking out its black and white modes.  I’m not yet convinced that it’s a decent camera for black and white photography, but perhaps more experimentation will yield better results?

December was a relatively busy month with the camera so far, all in the name of putting the LX3 through its paces, you understand. :)  It’s also helped that, after the dullest summer for years, we’ve enjoyed a relatively sunny (if cold) end to the year.  A trip down to the Glamorgan Heritage Coast is always good for an eye-catching shot, and this year was no exception.  With my Dad visiting to drop off and pick up Christmas presents, and his new Canon Powershot G9 to compare with the LX3, we headed off down Cardiff Bay for a day.  Although we weren’t very impressed by the latest Doctor Who exhibition, as the sun set I was able to snag my favourite photo of 2008.  And we did have fun with the cameras the following day at Caerphilly Castle, where amongst the stalls of the medieval fayre I found a new supplier of the wonderful Moniack Mead :)  If you’ve never had Moniack before (and chances are you haven’t unless you’re a sad LARPer or you’re married to one like I am) then you’re really missing out.

Finally, to bring the year to an end, we spent Boxing Day out in the Brecon Beacons with the cameras.  Four years ago the Beacons were covered in snow, but this year muddy paths and bright sunlight (eventually) greeted us.  We started at the Castle in Crickhowell, moved on to a large but seemingly imposssible to reach without trespass standing stone on the north bank of the Usk, before enjoying a beautiful walk along the towpath of the Brecon and Monmothshire Canal to Brecon and back in the setting sun.

Behaviours Alone Are Not Enough

In his audiobook on Principle-Centered Leadership, Dr. Stephen R. Covey gives a classic example of why great behaviour alone isn’t sufficient to perform well, using the metaphor of a map.  Imagine you’re in a city you’ve never visited before, and you’re trying to find your hotel using a map. Unfortunately you have the wrong map.  If you’ve cultivated a level of industriousness, you might persevere, charging up and down each street until eventually you might stumble across the hotel.  If you’ve cultivated enthusiasm or (heaven forbid) positive thinking, you might not mind that you can’t find the hotel.  But the problem stopping you from finding the hotel isn’t your behaviour - it’s that you have the wrong map.

The hotel in the example represents your goal, and the map represents your current understanding of whatever environment or context that your goal exists within.  With an incomplete or faulty understanding (the wrong map), you cannot find your way to your goal (the hotel) except by luck and chance.  Success based on luck and chance isn’t sustainable, and it isn’t repeatable or reproducible in the future.

Our behaviours - the way we act - create our own personal learning environment.  To consciously learn from this environment, we have to attend to our thoughts and understandings, and evolve our paradigms to be both broader and deeper.

A paradigm is a view of the world, a mental model that we construct in our heads in order to understand the world around us, and in order to interact with it.  We build these models all the time subconsciously, and our society teaches its own models to us throughout our childhoods.  They are often described as our programs - the underlying rules of an individual’s thought that guide our behaviours in life.

Our paradigms are the causes of our problems, and they also where the solutions lie. 

Your Paradigms Must Evolve

Albert Einstein once said, ”We can’t solve our problems by using the same kind of thinking we used when we created them.”  Our problems are caused by faulty paradigms - mental models that fall a little short when put to the test.  But what causes more problems - faulty paradigms themselves, or the inability to evolve better paradigms in the face of fresh evidence?  According to Einstein, it’s the inability to evolve better paradigms.  But why is this true?

There are always things that we don’t fully understand, perhaps because it is a new subject that we are still learning, or our learning is incomplete or misdirected, or because we’ve had unusual experiences arising from extreme circumstances.  As a result, many (if not most) of our paradigms will be incomplete or inaccurate.  It’s not just our own paradigms that are incomplete, it’s also the paradigms of everyone else too.  It’s self-evident that incomplete paradigms aren’t a major problem, because life goes on and we continue to make progress despite (or because of!) them.

A faulty paradigm can also be a mental model that was accurate or complete, but is now out of date.  It may have been effective once, but it sure isn’t effective any more.  The people we manage and the work we manage never stands still; it is always changing.  The world in which we live and work is also changing all the time. Our own place in the world is also changing all the time.  What happens when life moves on, but people can’t move with it?  What happens when new paradigms are required, but people continue to apply the same paradigm even though it is no longer effective?

Every bad manager I have observed all shared the same characteristic: they were unable to evolve their paradigms.  They were stuck in the past, trying the same actions time and time again. They would persist with this behaviour long after it became clear that these actions were no longer effective or appropriate.  In the worst cases, the managers were trying time and time again to apply the same paradigms even though they had never worked in the first place!  

By their inability to change and adapt, they weighed everyone down.

The Cost Of Persistently Faulty Paradigms

People who cannot evolve their paradigms become larger and larger sea anchors for their organisations, slowing down the whole ship and stopping everyone else getting to where they are trying to get to.  Your good people - the people you need to build a successful business around - can see through this behaviour every single time.  They have an almost natural aversion to managers who are stuck in a rut; managers who cannot evolve their paradigms.  And the results - friction, conflict, insecurity and a breakdown in basic trust and respect - are completely unhealthy, both to you, your staff, and your organisation.

You owe it to yourself, and to everyone around you, to learn to evolve your paradigms, to elevate your thinking above wherever it currently is.  You also owe it to everyone to deal decisively with subordinates (especially managers and leaders) who cannot.

But how exactly can we evolve our paradigms?  I will answer that in the next article.

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My photo of a stone wall on the Western Isles of Scotland has just become the third of my photos to reach the milestone of 1,000 views on Flickr.

This is even more of a surprise than my graffiti photo (which has now accelerated past the 1,600 views mark), as I just can’t imagine who is looking at this photo or why it is so popular.  From the information provided by Flickr’s stats, it seems that its catching the eye of folks searching for stone walls on Yahoo Images …

This view from atop Caerphilly Mountain will be on display as part of the slideshow of the Freedom 2008 exhibition.  Organised through Flickr, Freedom 2008 is part of Photomonth - the East London Photography Festival running at the Dray Walk Gallery, Old Truman Brewery during 29th October – 9th November 2008.  

There’s a discussion thread on Flickr where everyone selected for this exhibition is currently posting their shots.  If, like me, you can’t actually make it to London to see the exhibition for yourself, check out the thread.  Congrats to everyone who had a photo selected!

If you drive down the A470, over the Gabalfa fly-over and into Cardiff city centre, you’ll be familiar with one of the peculiarities of the roads in Cardiff.  I’m not talking about the continuous experimentation with partially-closing St Mary’s Street; I’m referring to where four lanes of traffic goes down to just three as you reach Blackweir.  On the right there’s the long, thin car park with the beauty of Bute Park beyond, and overhead the direction of traffic is controlled by these new digital signs.  That car park has been built over the top of the old Glamorganshire Canal.

The new signs were installed either in 2007 or 2008 (I didn’t make a note of exactly when), and they replaced older mechanical signs that sat on top of the same gantry.  (I have a similar shot of the old signs that I’ll dig out and post later).  You’d have thought that they could have given the gantry a lick of fresh paint at the same time, wouldn’t you?

Last Saturday, Kristi and I headed down to Margam Country Park near Port Talbot to meet up with quite a few folks from the Welsh Flickr Cymru group on Flickr.  We had a great time, took loads of photos, and even got to see a few deer

Thoughts On The Day

After a summer of wet and dull weekends, it was a real joy to be out and about once more with the camera.  For what I think was the first time this year, instead of heading out with just the 18-135mm lens, I packed up the full kit - Sigma 10-20mm lens, Nikkor 18-135mm lens, Sigma 50mm macro lens, and the long-reaching Sigma 80-400mm uber-lens.  

As always on a Saturday, we headed down to the Knapp first to play some Tai Chi, wolf down some lovely Segafredo coffee, and then pottered down the M4 to Margam Country Park.  We all met up in the car park first, which was very handy, as neither Kristi nor I really know anyone from the Welsh Flickr Cymru group.  We said hello to everyone, posed for the group photo, and then buggered off on our own for the day.  I’d seen the old chapel up on the hill plenty of times driving past on the M4 and with the glorious weather was determined that this was the day I was finally going to make it up there

On the way to the chapel, we ran what I think was a volunteer group, who were working on rebuilding the old path up the hill.  They’re currently making it safer than it was, and they hope to have it finished in about six months or so.  Until they’ve finished, to get to the chapel its a short walk up the road and then take the first left by the footpath sign.  The footpath is a little muddy, but it wasn’t overgrown at the time.

It’s well worth the trek up the hill just for the view:

We headed back down to enjoy lunch outside the house, watching the deer running through the trees behind.  Sandwiches downed, we set on in search of deer!  I shot a good 30-40 shots of two deer under the trees.  Another photographer (not part of the meet I believe) wandered by partway through, and made the comment that surely we’d both taken enough shots of the deer by then.  I’m glad we ignored him, because out of those 40 shots, I only ended up with 4 that I was happy with.  Even with the 400mm lens, it was difficult to get close shots of the deer eating under the trees.  Might be time to trade up to a 500mm lens next

Further along, the path climbs up to the top of another hill overlooking the country park.  The top of the hill features a lovely little copse of trees, and a very strange brick-lined pit.  Kristi reckons it must have been a swimming pool, but if you can shed any light on it, please leave a comment below!

My favourite memory of the whole day has to be the gum tree near the Orangery.  As you approach it, all you can hear is the humming of all the bees drinking nectar from the tree.  There’s a lovely bench underneath where you can sit, relax, and just enjoy the sheer sense of life all around you.

The Photos

Post Production

Since March this year, I’ve been working on improving my HDR post-production technique, trying to find the right settings in both Photomatix Pro 2 and Aperture 2 to tone down the unrealistic colours to match the ‘faded’ look I’ve been developing since my Taff Vale Eastern Ridge Walk set last year.  Although it adds a lot of time to the post-production work, the results are photos that hopefully are starting to take on a distinctive style not just in composition but also in colour and appearance.

Found On Flickr

Don’t forget to check out all of the other excellent photos taken by members of Welsh Flickr Cymru during this meet.

This is caused by two problems:

• libvirtd (/etc/init.d/libvirtd) sets up its own network bridge device, assigns the IP address range 192.168.122.* to this device, and kicks off its own copy of dnsmasq to provide DHCP services to your virtual machines.  Use chkconfig to switch off libvirtd and reboot CentOS to clear this problem.
• If you don’t specify a MAC address in your XenU’s config file, each XenU gets a randomly generated MAC address.  An upstream change in udev (which Gentoo uses) ensures that each ethernet interface with a different MAC address is assigned a new eth* number, which will screw up your networking start scripts.  Edit /etc/udev/rules.d/70-persistent-net.rules file and rename the ethernet devices in there, and then make sure you specify the same fixed MAC address in your XenU’s config file too.

I hope this saves time for other people.

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Work News

I’m still wrestling with the problem of taming the department’s TODO list, and so far I haven’t decided whether or not MS Project Server is a help or a hinderance. It’s fair to say that some of us have had trouble believing that it’s a product someone would actually want to charge money for.

But it is nice being able to sit down and put together a comprehensive technical plan. It’s no secret that I’ve no time either for the vast majority of online project management tools (of which Basecamp is the poster child) nor the people that these tools are aimed at. Project management is, by necessity, a rich and detailed skill. It can be simplified to stop it becoming the Ministry for Administrative Affairs, but it can’t be glossed over. I was horrified when certain folks I’ve worked with in the past used to laugh about being unable to create project plans. I’m a great believer that if you don’t want to do the job properly (whatever your job is), get out the way and let someone else do it right instead.

And what I love about my new job is that my boss is on my back all the time to get the job done right. That’s how it should be. We’re building something special at Gradwell, and you can’t do that if things aren’t done right.

Tech News

Rather than buy a 3G iPhone, I decided to get a HTC TyTn II instead. Unlike the iPhone, it has a removable battery, and it can be used as a 3G modem by my MacBook Pro - extending the battery life of my laptop by a good 45 mins. It also has a very usable slide-out keyboard, making it very easy to use as a way to get at my email when I’m out and about.

The downside is that it runs Windows Mobile. You think Vista is bad? Windows Mobile is worse. It crashes daily, comes with the second worst browser around (Internet Explorer for Windows Mobile), and doesn’t seem to have an equivalent to Apple’s App Store. The email client is quite good - except that this week it has decided to freeze when syncing email with work’s IMAP server. Tomorrow’s job is to snag someone else’s TyTn II at work and do some testing to see whether it’s my device, or the IMAP server.

Turns out that the TyTn II is also surprisingly affordable. If you try and buy an unlocked one, the cheapest I’ve seen was over 450 pounds. Nowhere seems to stock one either, so I’m not sure how easy they are to get hold of that way. Instead, I signed up for a 12 month contract with Vodafone. For 30 pounds a month, I get the TyTn II and a 5GB data allowance. At the end of the 12 months, I can cancel the contract, I get to keep the TyTn II, and I’ve saved a hundred pounds. Bargain.

Sad News

Last Friday was Rob’s funeral. The service was held in St Mary’s Church in Butetown, and it was standing room only. I thought it was a lovely service, and a great send-off for him. He was buried in Thornhill Cemetery, where we watched as mourners grabbed shovels and buried the coffin there and then. After that, a lot of folks headed down to the Wharf, but I couldn’t face it. I came home and locked myself away for the rest of the day. I just wanted to be alone with my own grief.

I think Corina said it best when she described Rob’s passing as a bad dream that we all wish we could wake up from. After the wife, and being at work, I probably spent more time with Rob than with anyone else the nine years that I knew him.

Teaching News

I had the all-important bit of paper through from Barry College. I’m now formally qualified to teach adults in Lifelong Learning programmes. I passed the teaching assessment with a grade ‘A’ too, which gives me a bit more confidence as I try to turn the Tai Chi class into a more structured two year programme. The whole point of the changes is to build on what Rob figured out about learning Tai Chi, to put it into a format that’s more accessible yet again and also into a plan that’s well paced for the students.

I’m also hard at work with the camcorder, experimenting with the best way to record Tai Chi lessons. This is something I must work harder on

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How Children Start To Learn

When we were small children, starting at pre-school age, we all played a lot.  We used our imaginations to play games like Cops and Robbers, Cowboys and Indians, and many others.  We sure had a lot of fun, and we also learned a lot from it.  Children play games as a way to explore new ideas and roles.  The more they explore, the more sophisticated their ideas in this area become.  Eventually, those who remember their dreams and work hard go on to play these roles for real as adults.  But most of us do not.

As we grow older we get a bit more serious, and playing games (especially in the workplace) no longer seems appropriate to us.  We exchange learning through playing for learning through doing, with a sprinkling of training and education thrown in for good measure.  Most of our doing as adults comes through holding down a job to pay the bills, and it becomes the environment where we find most of our opportunities to learn.

On the job training has become something of a dirty term in the workplace today, because it’s normally a euphemism for being thrown in at the deep end with insufficient / non-existent help and support.  The reason for the lack of support is simply that many employers and managers don’t know how to instruct and coach their staff.  It is something that they have no interest in, and are not comfortable doing.  But they should have such an interest, because the irony is that the workplace is the best place to learn work-related skills - provided we are able to play before we have to be. ((I will talk about the relative merits of training courses in a later article.))

All play starts with behaviours - actions and attitudes that we show to others (externalise).  The game we are playing is how to manage yourself.  If you’re on your own, where can you look for help and advice?

Turn To The Coach

In this field, the work of John C. Wooden stands head and shoulders above everything else.  John C. Wooden was the head coach of the UCLA college basketball team from 1948 to 1975, where he not only consistently created great teams, but where he consistently got the very best out of his charges.  His outstanding work was honoured in 1999 when Coach Wooden was voted ‘Coach of the 20th Century’ by ESPN, and by the award of the President Medal of Freedom (the USA’s highest civilian honour) in 2003.

During his time in basketball, Coach Wooden developed his Pyramid of Success.  It has three key ingredients that make it a great approach for learning how to manage yourself.

• It is principle-based, not practice based - created decades before management books and coaching understood this fundamental approach.  Practices come and go, but the right principles are timeless, and can last for thousands of years.
• It has stood the test of time.  Created over 50 years ago, it was honed through Coach Wooden’s teaching to his college students and teams.   His students took the Pyramid out into the wider world of sports and business, and made it the foundation of their success too.  And since 2003, the management community at large has been able to learn about and apply Coach Wooden’s work through his book Wooden on Leadership.
• It is about you, not about others.  In a time of short-termism, downsizing, offshoring and the threat of recession, it can be no surprise that management writing has come to focus so strongly on the here and now.  All sports coaches are in one of the ultimate results-driven environment; they need immediate results far more than your average manager does, and they have to contend with a turnover of staff (in their case, players) that your average manager never has to face.  But Coach Wooden and his record of coaching at UCLA proved beyond all doubt that, even in such an environment, both short-term results and long-term success comes from within, from internal work that at first seems both unnecessary and without immediate reward.  Success comes from within you the manager, and it must be instilled within each and every member of your team.

The Pyramid of Success

Coach Wooden’s Pyramid of Success contains 15 separate building blocks for you to work on.  Along the bottom are the five foundation blocks that leadership is build upon.

1. Industriousness: Success travels in the company of very hard work.  There is no trick, no easy way.
2. Friendship: Strive to build a team filled with camaraderie and respect: comrades-in-arms. 
3. Loyalty: Be true to yourself.  Be true to those you lead.
4. Co-operation: Have utmost concern for what’s right rather than who’s right.
5. Enthusiasm: Your energy and enjoyment, drive and dedication will stimulate and greatly inspire others.

If the foundation layer is about your heart, then the next layer is all about using your head.

1. Self-control: Control of your organisation begins with control of yourself.  Be disciplined.
2. Alertness: Constantly be aware and observing.  Always seek to improve yourself and the team.
3. Initiative: Make a decision!  Failure to act is often the biggest failure of all.
4. Intentness: Stay the course.  When thwarted try again; harder, smarter.  Persevere relentlessly.

At the heart of the Pyramid is the formula for teaching success that Coach Wooden learned from Coach Ward Lambert during his playing career.

1. Condition: Ability may get you to the top, but character keeps you there - mental, moral and physical.
2. Skill: What a leader learns after you’ve learned it all is what counts most of all.
3. Team Spirit: The star of the team is the team.  ’We’ supersedes ’me’.

The first twelve blocks together create a platform for success, but to elevate yourself to achieve your full potential, you have to master the cornerstones of true greatness.

1. Poise: Be yourself.  Don’t be thrown off by events whether good or bad.
2. Confidence: The strongest steel is well-founded self-belief.  It is earned, not given.

Finally, we reach the very pinnacle of the Pyramid of Success - the behaviour that the rest of the pyramid supports:

1. Competitive Greatness: Perform at your best when your best is required.  Your best is required each day.

There is far more to Coach Wooden’s Pyramid of Success than I can do justice to in this article, and I would much rather you learned more about it from Coach Wooden himself.  You can download a printable version of the Pyramid, and learn more about each of these building blocks from Coach Wooden’s website.  His 2003 book, Wooden on Leadership, expands on them still further, and is essential reading for anyone looking to follow the Invest In Loss philosophy.

Coach Wooden used it to build a great basketball coach; you can use it to build a great manager - yourself.

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• At the personal level, you’re a role model for everyone around you.  People will look at you and take the message that it is okay for them to act that way too.
• At the inter-personal level, you’re directly influencing how other people feel about working with you.  The way you treat other people directly affects the results you’ll obtain from them.
• At the managerial level, you set the tone for how the whole department will function.  Your choices here will determine how well the department functions - especially when (not if) you’re not around.
• At the organisational level, your individual actions determine whether your department adds value at all, and whether it’s because of you … or despite you.

But how do you go about improving your self-management?

Start Here - Acceptance

You must start by accepting a simple truth: you can learn to consciously choose your responses to whatever happens in your life.  You are not just responsible for your choices - you are able to choose your responses (response-able).

It can be very difficult for new and inexperienced managers to come to see - and especially to accept - just how much influence they really do have, and it always comes down to how much you choose your responses.  Most people do want to be lead, and they do want to be governed, but it must come from someone they can look up to in one way or another.  If you are not cultivating yourself through self-improvement, through learning to choose your responses, then what could there possibly be about you for anyone to look up to?  If they don’t look up to you, at best they follow you reluctantly - if at all.

You are not your past achievements, and if you do not learn to choose your responses, it’s down to luck and circumstance as to whether or not you’ll be able to be successful again in the future.  It won’t be down to you!

The Cycle Of Self Improvement

There is no substitute for hard work.  A person who works hard, and who learns to self-improve, is far more likely to achieve their full potential than someone who always finds things easy.  There is a deeper understanding that comes from hard work and applied brain power than what comes from applied brain power alone.  This is something I’ll come back to in a later article.

With self-improvement, we’re all about stacking the odds in our favour.  We want to reduce both luck and chance as factors in our success, and instead we want to increase ourselves as the factor in our success.  Hard work without direction, organisation and supervision relies entirely on both luck and chance.

The Cycle of Self Improvement contains five key areas where you will find the self-improvement that you are looking for:

Behaviours are where we start.  We start by doing our best to act in the same way that we’d imagine a great manager would act.  We research, and we apply what we’ve learned to what we do and how we do it.  Or, to put it another way, we fake it until we make it.  This is difficult at first, because we’re trying to be something that we don’t necessarily understand …

Paradigms are where we start to gain an understanding.  By changing our behaviours, and learning what works and what doesn’t, we start to change the way we think about ourselves and our work.  If we make a conscious effort to study whatever we are trying to improve at, we will create new models in our heads of how this particular area works.

Maturity is where our actions (our behaviours) and our thinking (our paradigms) are refined in the crucible of experience.  As we mature in our role, there’s less faking it, less mistakes, and more genuine ability.  Our understanding matures, and we move beyond mere knowledge to the point where we ‘get it’.

Character is where our maturity of understanding feeds back and we internalise what until now have been entirely outward changes.  We start conquering our demons (and those of our parents that we’ve inherited), and move towards a freedom of operation, of living, that most people never achieve.  We become more rounded as people as we smooth off corners and jagged edges.

Eventually, we go beyond ourselves and learn to Invest in Loss.  It isn’t about us any more; it’s about what is and what needs to be.  We learn to accept reality and work with things instead of against them.  We move from trying to be masters of the universe to being its servant, which is where life suddenly gets a whole lot easier :)

Finally, we start again with behaviours; we apply our new understanding all over again, continuing round the cycle once more.  No matter how good any of us get, we’re all capable of further improvement, of further polishing.  There are always deeper levels of understanding available to us, but only if we put the hard work in first and master the outer levels.

These are the five steps of the cycle of self improvement, and we’ll look at each one in turn over the next five articles here on the Invest In Loss blog.

We Have An Infinite Capacity To Improve

There is always more room for improvement, which is why the cycle goes back to the beginning and starts again.  Our aim is to smooth things out, to bring every aspect of ourselves up to the same level, and then to raise that level over and over again.  It was this strategy - to find and improve 100 things by 1% - which is widely attributed to bringing World Cup success to the England Rugby Union team in 2003.

A word of caution though: entropy (and specifically the principle of use it or lose it) applies just as much to self-improvement as to any other aspect of life.  If you stop trying to improve, you will inevitably regress over time.  This isn’t work you can do during study days, or through a few days on a management training course.  There are no secrets, and there are no quick wins.  You have to integrate this work into your life, and into every single day that you can.

If you can achieve that, you’ve done the hardest work of all.

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The time has flown by - I must be having a lot of fun :) 

It’s a shame that this First Great Western train I’m on atm (the 19:15 from Paddington to Swansea) isn’t going as quick.  For once, it’s not the fault of First Great Western or their (in my experience, all too often unprofessional) staff, but after two hours we’re just pulling into Didcot Parkway, and not Cardiff where we should be.  Hopefully we’re past the latest problem to plague this service, and it’ll be a much quicker second half of the journey!

This job is full of pleasures both big and small.  One of the small ones today was to introduce one of my colleagues to the joy that is the Foyles bookshop in London.  If you’ve never been to Foyles, it’s difficult to explain why this wonderful shop is different to all the other bookshops in central London (and, I believe, in the UK as a whole), but every time I get to show someone this mecca of books, the reaction is always a good one.

I managed to escape with just three books: one of the Wu style of Tai Chi, a replacement for my loaned-and-never-to-be-returned copy of the Principles of Effortless Power (another martial arts book), and the new book from Packt on OpenSER.  That last one is going to live in the office, me thinks.

I also managed to escape the Apple store without a new Macbook Pro, but only because they didn’t have a 4GB RAM model to hand for me to take with me there and then (they normally do the upgrade in the shop on demand, but I didn’t have the time to wait the three hours they quoted for it).  As much as I love my current Macbook Pro, I’m finding the short battery life (<2 hours on average) to be a bit tight on the longer journeys I’m now doing.  The later generations can manage double that, which I’d find much more convenient.  Ah well, maybe later in the year as a Christmas treat to myself. 

The worst thing I’ve done so far was totally self-inflicted.  I managed to brick my Nokia N82.  As wonderful as Parallels is for running Windows on the Mac, never ever try running a Nokia firmware upgrade using it.  I tried; the whole virtual machine died partway through the firmware upgrade, and the N82 was toast.  (Wouldn’t it be great if Nokia had A/B firmware slots like digital cameras do?  They could release firmware upgrades much more regularly and not be worried about silly folks like me bricking their phones).  It had to be sent back to Nokia, and I’m missing it greatly.  I hope it comes back soon!  Then I can start loading Ordnance Survey raster data onto it

Oh, we’ve just made it to Swindon.  Maybe I’ll make it home today instead of tomorrow after all …

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The roots of success always come from within. Your team, your organisation, the results it produces and the service you provide to your customers; ultimately all of these will be a reflection of you and the way that you conduct yourself. You can only control and influence others through your own actions; if you don’t have control over yourself, how can you possible extend that control to others successfully and sustainably?

The very first step in managing using the Invest In Loss philosophy is to learn to manage yourself.

Know Thyself

Someone once told me that you can’t manage what you can’t understand, and I believe that this advice applies equally well when it comes to managing yourself. How can you manage yourself if you don’t understand yourself?

How well do you really know yourself?

The place to start is to simply become aware of your behaviour, and how close it does (or does not) relate to the reality all around you. How many lies and half-truths do you have to tell to get through each day? How often do you have to bluff and bluster your way through situations and relationships with your colleagues, your friends, and your families? When do you stand and get stuck in, and when do you run and avoid? When do you say one thing, but do another? Why are you having to do so? What are the reasons behind you behaving in this way?

At first, simply focus on becoming aware of when you act like this, and on determining why. Don’t do anything in particular at this stage to change your behaviour, just focus on improving your self-awareness day by day. If you don’t already, start keeping a daily diary where you can capture your observations and thoughts. Look in particular at the boundaries of your world - your interactions with other people, both professional and personal. Seek out where friction occurs, where things are not smooth and plain sailing, and where emotions (especially yours) regularly boil over. Focus entirely on what you are doing.

You Reap What You Sow

When you’ve been building up your observations for some time (I’d recommend at least a month, and preferably several months), the next step is to see how far you are (or aren’t) disjointed from the reality around you.

Continue to capture the observations of your own behaviour, but now start to add in observations about your external world. How well is that latest project going? What are your customers grumbling about this week? If you are already a manager, what are your staff saying about you? What are they saying about your decisions? How are the family? What should be happening, but isn’t?

Over time, you will start to gain a new awareness: how your lies and half-truths, how your blustering and bluffing, and how your avoidance and your fear are related to the problems you encounter in the external world. Your world - your reality - is a reflection of your behaviour, and more importantly of the way that you choose to behave. You must stick with this exercise for as long as it takes for the penny to drop. As a manager, your team or organisation will also be a reflection of the way that you choose to behave.

You cannot sustainably manage others until you can manage yourself.

Deep Roots Are Hidden From View

Deep and meaningful change comes from internal work. It is not for the faint of heart. It requires a commitment and dedication that you probably haven’t known before. You must give up being both selfish and selfless, and become self-ful instead. You must become completely focused on observing and altering your own state of being. You don’t need to worry about changing other people at this time. If you make the right changes, other people will respond to you in the right way if they can.

This is work that never ends, which is precisely why it produces truly sustainable results.

Working from the principle of cause and effect, start to look at whatever comes before the situations where your behaviour is disconnected from reality. In any situation, you behave the way you do because of the state you are in when you enter the situation. Focus on understanding what your entry state currently is for your each of your situations, and add those observations to your ongoing diary. Seek to understand your starting point each and every time, and on how these starting points result in the behaviours that we’re seeking to change.

For each of these starting points, take a piece of blank paper, and write down what you wish they were. It might be helpful to create a mind map for each starting point. Work out what you need to ensure that you wouldn’t need to lie, to bluff, to avoid; what you need to be confident, on top of things, and to able to act. Don’t feel constrained in any way by your current circumstances. Don’t compromise on your list.

Once you’ve worked out what each starting point should be, go back further, and look at what you are currently doing immediately before you get to each of these places. This is where you need to make changes. Your starting points are actually the end points of previous activities, or of activities that are currently missing altogether! Fix these activities, and everything else will follow.

This is what we mean when we talk about beginning with the end in mind.

The Never-Ending Circle

The work presented here never ends. The end of one thing is always the beginning of the next, even if the connections aren’t immediately apparent. Thankfully, we’re all capable of an infinite amount of polishing up, of improvement over time - as long as we take responsibility for our own progress. By choosing your behaviour, and establishing your entry state by ensuring the previous activities end the way you need them to, over time you’ll grow the degree of management you have over yourself … and ultimately over others.

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The first week in the new job has been great.  I’ve got this big silly grin on my face (even though I’m thoroughly knackered from all the commuting).  There’s a lot of hard work ahead, but it’s exactly the sort of work that I find fun.  I guess there’s something wrong with me

The travelling hasn’t been too bad.  Monday was the worst, when the 18:35 from Bath Spa didn’t turn up at all.  I finally got home just after 21:00, thoroughly shattered.  Lesson learned; I need to be out the door in time for the 16:35 where possible, or for the 17:35 at the latest.  Any later than that, and a hotel for the night is worth serious consideration.

Working on the train out from Cardiff on a morning is a real luxury.  Most managers never get - or take - the time on a morning to review the day ahead.  At the moment, the time’s mostly going on all the new stuff I have to learn, but it’s going to be a real godsend as I’m more involved in the day to day.  Amusingly (to me, anyway) this is the same train I was catching down to Southampton during my secondment to the OS (albeit an hour earlier), so it already feels like I’ve been doing this routine for months.

On the train back, it’s a bit more hit and miss.  Most days, I’ve been able to snag a table seat, or one of those seats at the end opposite the space for the wheelchairs (those spaces are the best; the table seats on these First Great Western commuter trains are quite cramped), but when FGW forget to stick the right number of carriages on the train, it’s standing-room only all the way back to Cardiff.  Thankfully, there are plenty of excellent audiobooks one can buy and listen to when this happens.  Management audiobooks are very popular, but I’m seriously thinking of getting all of the Harry Potter audiobooks for when distraction is the better approach.

I have to give a special mention, and a huge thank you, to everyone for making me feel so welcome.  Most places make an effort for new staff, but this is different, because I don’t think they’re making a special effort.  It feels a lot like my time working at the University of Sheffield - and those were without doubt the happiest years of my professional life so far.

I definitely owe Aled a beer for putting me onto this job in the first place.

I ran into Richard from Box UK on the platform at Cardiff a couple of times this week.  It’s nice to hear that I’m being missed, and I certainly miss the sort of work I wanted to do there, but right now I don’t miss the work I ended up doing there.  Everyone tells me that I’m great at consultancy, but it doesn’t give me the personal satisfaction that working on products, services and systems does.  I guess it’s why I took to Tai Chi; I’m a natural observer, and I love that iterative polishing and improving something release after release after release.  You just don’t get that in consultancy.  Consultancy all to often is like a one-night stand.  As some of you who are married will understand from your own experience, there’s a much more meaningful fulfilment to be had from a deeper commitment.

I bumped up the RAM on the MacBook Pro this evening.  It’s now at the max of 3GB; shame it won’t go to 4GB like the later generation MBPs will.  It’s mostly to speed up Aperture 2, and to make things a bit quicker when I’m running a couple of virtual machines at a time (CentOS and Ubuntu for work).

Tomorrow is toy day.  Got to send the dead Cisco router back for a replacement, and the new phone and GPS navigator should arrive too.  I’ve bought the Garmin Mobile XT product and an unlocked Nokia N82 to run it on.  The N82 is mainly to play with VoIP over Wifi, although it does have a 5 megapixel camera too, which I’m looking forward to.  Bath is a very pretty place after all, and I’m learning the virtue of travelling as light as possible.

Hopefully Sunday I’ll make it out to get some more Merthyr Road photography done.  There’s some old railway tracks in the woods at Treforrest that I wouldn’t mind taking a careful look at.

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Most of Thursday went on a nice walk around Pontypridd, taking photos for my next Merthyr Road article, which I’m calling Bridging The Rivers At Pontypridd.  I also wrote up blog articles for two older photosets from my travels … Winter In Eden, and Back in Brighton.  That brought me almost up to date (but not quite) with my backlog of work.  Spent the evening processing the bridge photos, and went to bed unhappy with the results.

Friday was a lazy day, after tidying up the house that is!  Two more photography blog articles to clear the backlog: The Towers Of Brains Brewery, and Easter In The Malvern Hills.  Took another look at the bridge photos.  Decided to keep the HDR versions after all, but to tone down the colours to make them look much closer to LDR (ie normal) images.  Figured out how to fool Aperture into backing up photos to a network drive - I need to write that up in a blog posting.  Also had fun playing around with the “create a book” tools in Aperture.  I like the idea of taking my Merthyr Road articles, and making them into books that can be ordered online, but I think Aperture’s book features are a bit too limited for that.  More thought required here, me thinks.

Work up this morning with terrible cramp in my left calf.  Haven’t had a cramp attack like that for months!  Taught Kristi some basic Chinese massage so that she could fix up my leg.  Hobbled down to the station, and bought my monthly season ticket to Bath for Monday.  The look on the lady’s face was priceless, and I promised her that when I can finally afford an annual ticket (costing over £3k), I’ll come back and buy it through her, and not down in Cardiff.  Watched Never Back Down at Cineworld in Cardiff with Kristi … it’s shallow and predictable, but with plenty of eye candy on offer for both sexes.  Watch out for the guy who plays Ryan; I think we’ll see a lot more from him in the future.  Enjoyed the first episode of the new Doctor Who series this evening, although I still think that RTD over-uses background music. Here’s hoping he takes a back seat from here; the best episodes of the last season were those he didn’t write.

Kristi made me watch the original Buffy the Vampire Slayer movie this evening (boo for Sky+ boxes).  I’m utterly amazed that they managed to get a TV show off the ground on the back of this outing.  I managed to escape after an hour or so, but Kristi carried on as apparently the comedy vampire death at the end makes it all worth while.  Go figure.

Haven’t seen the footie yet (yay for Sky+ boxes; I get to spend Sunday morning vegged out watching Match of the Day), but I did read that Newcastle United won again :)  We must be safe from relegation now, and a good end to the season will improve spirits at the club ready for the next campaign.

I think I’m all set for Monday.  Part of me isn’t looking forward to the commute, but once I’ve settled into a routine and I’m able to work on the train, I’m sure it’ll just become a normal part of the day.  I’m really looking forward to starting the new job.  Working on secondment at the Ordnance Survey for the last few months reminded me just how much fun work can be when you’re working for the right sort of people and you’re encouraged to apply yourself to make a real difference.  In the last year, after years of a fairly stable life, I’ve lost three people to cancer.  Life is transitory, and if you’re just going through the motions every day, what’s the point?  That’s not living, it’s surviving.  That’s why I left my old job, because I want to get back to making a real difference, and I want to work for someone who demands that I do, rather than being afraid of me and looking to hold me back every opportunity going.  I wish everyone at Box UK well, and I hope they all achieve the success that they deserve.  But that chapter of my life is over now (well, almost; it’ll be over when basic paperwork like P45’s turn up), and I’m ready to take the next steps forward.

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When I called Demon to obtain my MAC code, I was asked about why I’m leaving.  I explained my reasons (I’ve gone from a 2mbit service to less than 512kbit service - that’s sub-broadband speed imho), and my disappointment in their technical support.  The chap on the other end of the phone expressed his sympathy; apparently I’m not the first customer to transfer his business for this reason.

But what struck me is that there was no effort to try and retain my business.

If a company cares about my custom, then I expect them to at least try to convince me to stay.  I would expect them to explore the options, just in case something can be done to make me happy once again.  (It doesn’t take all that much to make me happy; all you’ve got to do is keep my trust).

But Demon didn’t even try - although the chap I talked to was very helpful.  Like the call centre staff at BT, he seemed powerless to do anything to make a difference.

Hopefully someone will turn them around, and restore the excellent service that made them one of the very best ISPs before THUS bought them.  But until then, if you’re looking for a broadband service, I can’t recommend Demon at all.  

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After fun with the call centres on Monday, I dug my old bike out of the shed and headed up the Taff Trail for some much-needed exercise.  I made it all the way up to the Abercynon Feeder bridge, which is pretty good going for my first bike ride in a couple of years!  Then it was cook tea for Kristi before collapsing in a heap.

Yesterday went on my Tai Chi class prep.  I bought a Samson AirLine 77 wireless mic system a while back, so that I could record an audio lesson for my students.  Took the CDs down to the class last night, and hopefully in a couple of weeks I’ll get some good feedback to help me plan a v2. Also learned yesterday that one of my students passed away recently  More on that this evening when I update my Tai Chi blog.

This morning, and it was back to dealing with Demon and BT.  I checked with the bank, and neither organisation had provided the refunds that they had promised.  

I found this particularly amusing rant about Demon’s poor customer service, and whilst I don’t necessarily agree with his refusal to call their support line to get his MAC code, I have to say that his experiences with Demon largely mirror my own.  Now I just need to do some research and decide who to switch my broadband service to.  Sky is tempting, because it’s cheap, but I’m very happy to pay more in order to get a fixed-rate service.  I’m currently looking at the service from ukfsn.org.

BT got a letter of complaint.  I can’t remember the last time I wrote a snail-mail letter.  Anyone else unhappy with BT may find their Consumer Code of Practice to be a useful guide, especially their escalation procedure.  I’ll write more here when they respond.

As with Monday, it’s difficult to overstate the difference in contrast between Demon and BT, with their poor customer service, in the one corner, and other companies who do provide excellent customer service.  On Monday, it was Lloyds TSB showing how to do this, and today it was Hardware.com.  My brand new Cisco router has died  A quick chat with Anthony @ Hardware.com, and it was agreed that I should return it for a replacement.  Whilst it’s a shame the product turned out to be faulty, the way a company puts problems right makes a huge difference!

This afternoon, it’s get the shopping done, and then decide which dish to cook for when Kristi gets home from work.

Maybe tomorrow I’ll make it out to get some photography done!

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1. The first call centre was Demon’s, which is offshore.  Unfortunately, the call quality was terrible, and I was unable to progress my query with the lady at the other end.  Thankfully, Demon’s helpdesk is also available via email, otherwise I’d really be stuck there.
2. The second call centre was BT’s, which is also offshore.  The call quality was fine, but the lady at the other end wasn’t empowered to assist me with my query.  The systems she had access to required her to submit an internal query to another department - a process which quotes 5-7 working days for acting on a query. She did escalate my call to her supervisor at my request, and after some discussion her supervisor agreed to resolve my query today.  This isn’t the first time I’ve heard that from BT about this specific issue, so the jury’s still out about that.
3. The third and final call centre was LloydsTSB’s, which is here in the UK.  Fine call quality, and the phone answered by someone who not only seemed to have all she needed to resolve my two queries, but who also didn’t sound like she was reading from a script every time she answered a question.

I really feel for the folks out in India.  We don’t just seem to offshore the jobs themselves, but also we seem to send bad practices out there too (reading from scripts all of the time), and we don’t seem to give them the tools they need to do their job (poor call quality, no empowerment, and inefficient secondary processes).  I’m very impressed at their professionalism - in general, folks in India are educated to a very high level, and it can’t be easy having to do such a mundane job with poor practices and systems.  I somehow can’t imagine a UK-based call centre managing the same level of professionalism under the same circumstances.

I wonder what the quality of these three experiences this morning says about the management responsible for each of these services?

I do know what it says about the UK’s Direct Debit scheme.  Two of these companies (Demon and BT) owe me money, because they’ve used the Direct Debit scheme to over-bill me.  I’m seriously thinking of cancelling my Direct Debits with both firms, and paying them directly when their bills arrive instead.  Unfortunately, BT is still an effective monopoly, but at least I can cancel my Demon account and take my business elsewhere …

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Gentoo’s new Apache 2.2.8 default config also left behind the mod_ssl config file from Apache 2.0 (for some reason, instead of updating this file, Apache 2.2.8 comes with a mod_ssl file with a different name)

Also had problems with /usr/lib/apache2/logs not existing, and with Apache’s Listen directive being hidden away inside the default vhost, instead of in the main config file where it belongs.

All in all, took me a couple of hours to dig through everything and sort it out. It’s not like Gentoo’s Apache team to fsck things up as badly as this; I hope this isn’t a sign of things to come, or else I’ll fork these packages and maintain them myself.

Since setting up this blog to explore what it means to be a good manager, there have been a couple of large changes in my life that have had to take priority.

I’ve found myself having to step forward and take on my instructor’s Tai Chi class. My instructor, and the art of Tai Chi, have both had a major influence on the Invest In Loss philosophy that I’ve been working on. I owe him a debt that can never be repaid; the least I can do is to continue his class until he returns. (If you’d like to know how the class is going, I’ve setup a Tai Chi blog over on my personal website).

I’ve also been working away a lot in recent months. During the summer, I stepped into a project part way through, and applied this philosophy to ensure that we got the Explore website out the door on time and on budget. On the back of that success, I’ve been seconded to the Ordnance Survey to help them in a small way on the next set of features for Explore. The secondment leaves me hundreds of miles away from home, and from my library of books that I’m relying on whilst I explore the ‘You’ aspect of being a manager.

The secondment should come to an end before Easter, and then I hope to be back blogging about good management and the Invest In Loss philosophy.

The next article is slowly taking shape. It will be called ‘First Steps As A Manager: Managing One’, and it will draw heavily on John Wooden’s Pyramid of Success. John Wooden was an American college basketball coach during the 20th century, and a key part of his amazing record at UCLA was a 16-part approach to how you should manage yourself. I’ve worked for some great managers over the years, and I’ve had my fair share of outright awful ones too. All the great managers had fantastic self-management, and they lead by example. Definitely “do as I do, not as I say” people, if you know what I mean. And, equally, all the terrible managers had terrible self-management, with their personal problems always spilling out into the way they managed others.

If you’ve never heard of Wooden, and you’d like to become a better management, pick yourself up a copy of ‘Wooden on leadership’. His work has been an inspiration to countless people over the last thirty+ years; if the Invest In Loss philosophy is for you, then his work should be a great inspiration for you too.

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Seed Linux, hosted on Google Code, is the official successor to Gentoo Seeds project that I started during my time at Gentoo.  At the moment, there’s an embryonic overlay and wiki, and a handy script to build a Seed Linux Xen VM from scratch (tested on CentOS 5) - and four basic seeds for x86:

• portage-server is a simple local rsync server seed for the Portage tree, to save your Seeds having to sync their trees from the Net all the time.
• file-server is a very simple Samba server for running on a home or office file server.
• lamp-server is a basic LAMP (Linux, Apache, PHP 5, MySQL) stack, perfect for running a blog on.  It also supports mod_python and Ruby on Rails, but I plan on releasing a separate LAMR stack in the future (an optimised LAMP stack makes for poor LAMR performance, and vice versa).
• devbox is an empty seed, useful for developing other seeds

I’m also working on a basic home-gateway seed (email/anti-spam/internal DNS/VPN gateway), but that isn’t ready to commit just yet.

The whole idea behind the Seeds is to do what Gentoo has never managed - to provide out-of-the-box working solutions to specific problems.  To do that, I need somewhere I can host pre-compiled Seeds for users to download. If anyone can provide suitable diskspace and bandwidth (or knows anyone who can), I’d love to hear from you!

If You Do Not Change Direction, You Might End Up Where You’re Heading

One of the classic signs of bad management is the lack of a clear direction, with an organisation or group just drifting along on a day to day basis. Bad managers walk around all day underneath their own personal cloud - a personal cloud of “dunno”. They are judgemental instead of decisive, and about the only thing consistent about their decisions is their inability to chart a clear course forward. Bad managers have to spend more time micro-managing staff, because they have not established clarity of purpose and trust with their staff. Short term successes are quickly stopped in their tracks by the lack of longer-term planning and preparation. Both employees and customers drift into the organisation and then drift away again, unable to establish long-term partnerships with the company and its management - with the big cloud of “dunno”.

Direction provides the meaning to any relationship, whether it’s between managers and staff, suppliers and customers, or organisations and their competitors. Staff who understand and believe in your group’s goals will work towards those goals, because they understand how their efforts directly contribute to the overall success. Both trust and boundaries are established between manager and staff member. Suppliers who understand the real needs of a customer (especially the Unspoken Question) will do a better job of satisfying that customer, and of securing more business from them in the future. Organisations who mindfully position their services and goods in relation to their competitors are more likely to uncover blue oceans (new markets with little competition) instead of being forced into a war of attrition with their competitors.

It Takes Ten Hands To Score A Basket

As a manager, it’s your job to put the right people in the right place to get the best results possible. It is your people who ultimately get the job done - not you nor your fellow managers. Without their success, you have no success of your own. Their success comes from blending the right mix of personalities, approaches, attitudes and skills with the right number of people ready to take on the work at the right time. (A similar premise holds true for partner organisations, and assets such as machinery and other tools).

Organisation provides the route from start to finish, no matter how large or small the task. Men (and women!), materials and momentum are all managed through good organisation. Good organisation drives efficiency, through economy of resources and effort versus cost. Many crises can be completely prevented, because good organisation delivers robustness. Groups that have good organisation suffer less surprises and less disruption, and over time become more deterministic and predictable in their performance, making it easier for senior management to make their plans with accuracy and confidence.

Arms And Legs Are Like Wayward Children

There are always two aspects to any piece of work - that which is in plain sight, and that which hidden underneath. The plain sight stuff is what everyone concentrates on. It’s in the limelight, which is where the glory is. The plain sight stuff is the functional requirements (or the front-office) - the checkboxes that need to be ticked to say “Yes, it does what my business needs it to do.” But behind it, often hidden away from view, are the non-functional requirements (or the back-office). These are everything that’s needed to make the functional requirements possible. They are also the longer-term responsibilities, limitations, and costs that are incurred by any piece of work. When experienced managers talk about “the devil is in the detail”, this is what they are referring to. All too often, in today’s superficial world, the pressure is to deliver the functional requirements with little or no regard to the non-functional requirements and longer-term implications. Is it no wonder, then, that bad management often expresses surprise and anger at a later point in time when this approach comes back to haunt the organisation?

Supervision provides self-awareness for the group or organisation, by directing attention beyond the superficial and into the substantial. It can be a flash-light, casting a pool of weak light across a wide area, or it can be as focused as a laser beam, burning away the b.s. to reveal a specific truth buried underneath. Well-supervised groups eventually become self-supervising groups, because the understanding of what is required, why it is required, and what long-term implications are acceptable gets transferred from the manager to the workforce.

The First Principles Of Management

Direction, organisation, and supervision are the first principles of management. All management activity, without fail, involves one or more of these principles. Together they bring meaning, the route from start to finish and self-awareness to any group or organisation that adopts the Invest In Loss

philosophy of management.

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The Lure Of The Old Book

We all like the Old Book. We all feel good about it, because it’s like going into an exam with all the answers we believe we need. It contains all the answers we’ve ever learned, and all the instructions that we’ve done well by. That includes all the times where we didn’t really know what we were doing, but we somehow got through it anyway. ((I suspect that these have a prominent place in the Old Book, at least for some people!))

The Old Book contains the sum of all our experience to date, and like any investment, we want to protect it for all that it’s worth. I’m here to tell you that it isn’t worth shit, and that you should protect it accordingly.

The Prison We Build For Ourselves

Take a moment to make a mental list of all of those things you know in your own heart that you’re not managing very well. If you’re having trouble forming a list, reflect on the idea that there’s no such thing as a bad worker, only a bad manager, and then give it another go. Encompass everything that isn’t going well amongst everyone who works under you, or under the people who work for you. ((It’s always worth asking your staff to create this list for you, and then comparing notes.))

It’s not a very pleasant list, is it? Following the instructions from the Old Book is how all of this came to be. You, me, everyone - we’re all doing it. We fall back on almost-automatic behaviours, which just means that we try to apply a solution from the Old Book to whatever it is that is demanding our attention. We’re particularly susceptible to doing this when we’re under pressure ((I deliberately choose the word ‘pressure’ instead of stress. Folks who are genuinely under stress - or distress to use the full word! - typically can’t function at all, and are in urgent need of a different type of assistance)) - what most people would call reverting to type.

The more we do it - the more we get stuck in our ways - the less real choice we make. This behaviour creates a prison as real as any physical gaol. It’s not just a prison for us. As managers, we’re busy ushering into our prison everyone and everything that we manage, and everyone that they manage too.

You Don’t Need That Safety Blanket

Examine the language used to describe your local organisational hierarchy. The chances are that it describes your subordinates as being below you, and your boss as being above you. The very language we use to define our relationships with our colleagues re-enforces the belief many of us hold deep down that we’ve become managers and leaders because we’re somehow better than the people below us ((The next time you find yourself thinking like this, just bear in mind that People are promoted to their level of incompetence!)).

It also creates a similar image in those we manage.

This belief creates a very real psychological need for us to live up to this mental image. We cling to the Old Book like a child clinging to a safety blanket, because the Old Book is how we got into this position. The more insecure we feel, the tighter the grip. The tighter the grip, the more we strangle ourselves and everyone and everything that we manage.

Letting go requires an act of courage.

You need to have the courage to live in the now. Suspend preconceptions. Reserve judgement. Observe what is actually there. Listen for the unspoken question. Be aware of your assumptions, and test them before relying on them. Perceive the possibilities open to you. Understand the depths. Stop seeing only the shallows.

This is one of those areas where you can’t change the outside unless you change the inside first. Changing yourself is hard, and it is scary. We confuse ourselves with the Old Book, and we protect the Old Book mistakenly believing that we protect ourselves. Find the courage to see yourself as distinct from the Old Book, and everything will follow from there.

There’s a wealth of resources to immerse yourself in; many different ways to reach the same goal. Studying the ancient philosophies such as Taoism ((Also spelt Daoism)) and Zen Buddhism ((Particularly shoshin - Beginner’s Mind)) might work for you. The writings of Eckhart Tolle might suit you if you prefer a contemporary writer in this area. If you need a more physical approach, activities that cultivate meditation - such as yoga and many of the martial arts - are worthy of your investigation.

However you tackle it, you cannot afford not to.

Footnotes

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Different Approaches

The fundamental difference between the two is that you lead people, and you manage things.

Leaders direct those who look to them; leaders get people organised; and leaders supervise the people doing the work. Leadership is an inter-personal discipline with the leader often leading by example. By contrast, managers are concerned with where things are going, how we get there, and how well we’re doing at getting there, within a framework of considerations such as capability, capacity and many more. Management is a cross-discipline skill with the manager leading through others.

And that begs the question - can you be a manager without being a leader?

The Practical Blend

There are practical limits to the number of people that a single person can “lead”, even in this age of the Internet. There are only so many hours in the day, and that ultimately limits the amount of personal contact we can have with those we lead. Without that personal contact, leaders can still accrue a large following, but this comes at the cost of diluting the richness and quality of whatever activity the leader is about.

In order to scale up, leaders have to become managers too.

They have to add that extra dimension of ensuring that their vision comes to pass. They have to learn to achieve their goals through the efforts of others. Their leadership skills have to adapt to leading other leaders, starting with themselves. In return, they are able to tackle larger goals that are simply beyond the reach of small groups. They also gain a much greater chance of achieving long-term success in their ventures, because they shift from carrying the weight of the entire organisation on their shoulders to building an organisation that is more likely to be self-sustaining.  In the process, they create the space necessary for others to also make a difference - and this is at the heart of the concept of being greater than the mere sum of the parts.

Which One Are You?

Whilst both management and leadership are skills that can be learned, we all have natural tendencies that bias both our competence and our comfort towards either management or leadership roles. A little pressure is a great thing; it really reveals both character and competence. Under pressure, the natural leader will most likely revert to type, as will the natural manager.

Gain self-awareness, and under pressure you will rule your actions; your actions will not rule you.  And that’s the purpose behind this blog; to help you become a good manager whether or not you are a natural manager.

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I’ve reported the theft to the local Community Watch scheme, but so far this evening I’ve had no luck reporting it to the Police. The Community Liaison team are part-time (as in, not every day of the week), and when I called the number of my local station, the switchboard transferred me through to an extension that no-one answered.

This is my first experience of reporting something to the Police. It seems unlikely they’ll ever catch the thiefs or recover my stolen fog lights, but it would be nice to be able to actually report that a crime has happened Here’s hoping my experience isn’t as bad as Aled’s was.

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A few hours later, and I’ve switched my blog over to run off Wordpress instead. To fake the multi-blog feature of b2evo (which was b2evo’s killer feature), my blog’s homepage now runs a custom PHP script, which runs off the RSS2 feeds from the main topics. (The PHP script was a surprisingly interesting exercise, which I’ll cover on my new PHP blog).

Hopefully all the old links and feeds should still work too, but if you find any problems, let me know.

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I downloaded the latest beta of Parallels, only to find that the license key that came in the retail copy of Parallels wasn’t recognised by the beta. More than a bit puzzled (the instructions for the beta state that you can re-use your existing license key), I contacted Parallels’ support team for help.

It turns out that the retail copy of Parallels that I bought isn’t supported by Parallels at all. Not the customer service I was looking for. I have to go through the UK reseller for support.

Why do I have the feeling that this is going to turn into a saga?

Don’t make my mistake - if you want to get yourself a copy of Parallels, make sure you download it from their website. Don’t waste your money on a boxed copy from a store.

Please send all queries to nx@gentoo.org instead. I believe Stefan (genstef) has taken over the NX packages.

If that sounds like you, please contact him directly via raphael at 2x dot com.

There are great people already in place to pick up most of the projects and packages that I’ve been involved with over the last three and a half years. The NX packages and the Seeds project are the only two major ones where there’s currently no-one in place to hand them to. It’s no longer up to me what will happen to both of these inside Gentoo.

I have taken a full backup of the Seeds project. After a short break to recharge my batteries, I’ll move downstream (so to speak) and continue to develop the LAMP Server seed as an independent project outside of Gentoo.

I’ve stopped downloading email sent to my Gentoo email address. All email sent there will now go unread. If you want to get hold of me, I can be reached via my Gmail account - stuart dot herbert at gmail.com. This blog will disappear from Planet Gentoo soon (as is right and proper), but I’ll continue to post news about the Seeds project on my personal blog after my short break.

I’m currently working on a patch for the server/nxnode component so that it will create and install nxnode and nxserver as interpreted scripts. Mostly, it’s just a case of stripping out all the steps used for compiling the scripts, and trying to install the dedicated Perl interpreter.

Once that’s done, it’ll be time to fill out the src_install() function of the ebuild … and then we’ll have something we can start testing for real.